Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android M preview: tiny update, big deal”.
There are a billion people using android right now, but Google wants a billion more their plan to get them includes Android M a new version of the operating system. It tries to make everything simpler to use without making the operating system itself stupider, what’s like. If you were to put a sum it up in one sentence, the one thing that you want people to remember about what you’re doing next with Android yeah, it’s a great question work. You know what we’re focused on with em is really the core user experience and improving that, and so with em. What we wanted to do was really focus on product excellence and look at the areas as a user of Android. What are the things that you run into that annoy you or that could be improved areas that we feel are important like permissions, clearly very important area. We want our customers to be able to understand, what’s going on on their phones and we thought that was imperative when you click install and play it’ll install right away, but when the app wants to use something that we deem is permission worthy like taking pictures. That’S when we’ll prompt to you as a user – hey this app. You know this Tetris app wants to take a picture. You, okay with that, and you get to decide that makes sense to me I’ll. Do it, maybe because it wants to take a picture of you for the high scores or something okay, that makes sense to you.
You say yes or if it doesn’t feel right, you say no and then the app doesn’t get to do that at that point. So it’s much more contextual and we think it’s much more understandable for users. Now mobile payments in Google was first with Google Wallet, but that also meant it was first to fail, because Google Wallet really didn’t do that. Well, but now, with Android M, there’s Android pay, which Google promises is gon na be different. Google has been trying to do mobile payments in one form or another for quite a while.
Why is Android pay different? Why is it gon na work this time yeah? I think there’s a lot: that’s different. We’Ve created Android pay, which is meant to be across Android, and that’s why it’s called Android pay by the way. It’S because it’s all for all OMS. It’S not really meant to be a Google service. In that sense, like Gmail, is to be really for the Android ecosystem to adopt as a payment mechanism, and it’s it enables developers also to build apps on top of also so it’s kind of a platform to and the nice thing about, Android pay because of the Groundwork that we’ve been laying over the years, it will work across seven hundred thousand merchants right away in the US. So there’s a theme here which is reducing the number of steps it takes to accomplish a really complex task. The biggest way that happens is with Google.
Now, which now can work inside any app Google gets to search inside apps now what what on a high level talking about her? The way we think about this is how do you get? You know these smartphones are smart, but they can be smarter. They should help you stay informed, get things done, and but one of the things we’ve started thinking about is how do you get assistance in the moment when you’re looking at something – and you know you need quick answers to quick questions, so you’ve done a feature called Now, on tap when you’re doing something, how do you not get distracted and leave context and get quick answers? Two quick questions. So, if I said something like okay, Google, who is the lead singer what’s nice here, is that just continued playing? I got the answer just like any new playing by tapping and holding or by saying okay go go. You’Ve basically said. There’S something interesting here, help me with this right, I’m referring to this.
This is my context. How do we get from I’m doing a thing in my phone to Google knows what I’m doing at my phone and knows what to tell me about what I’m doing at my phone once you enable this feature, you’re, basically saying hey at this moment by tapping and Holding him saying like there’s something useful here: here’s the context do something with it right, what’s exciting, for developers is that this is yet another way that they can reach their users, in fact, at the time that they need it right. Take this example of the restaurant and like if I tap and hold and like you talked about you know a via and OpenTable would be a great next step for me to look at or Yelp is a great next step for me to look at all the App has to do is just existing dexterous right done.
How much of Android should I think of as being like a search product that is sending information to Google and how much of it should, I think of it as, like a flower eases the way we think about it is more. What can we build? That’S actually really useful for people and then what make people want to use it. That’S really sort of a high order bit for us. You know we could come up with all these amazing plans on how it’s can be so Google focused, but if users don’t want it, there’s really no point.
So the first principle is really helping users in their daily lives, whatever it is that they need to be doing, and that’s really what it’s about. .